By the time of his death at 60, Robert Lowell had fashioned a poetic career
that was disconcertingly intertwined with his life. He had married three times,
suffered from mental illness (for which he was regularly in hospital) and
detailed these events in his poetry. The cost of this interconnection between
life and work is referred to at the end of his controversial work, The Dolphin
(1973): "I have sat and listened to too many / words of the collaborating muse,
/ and plotted too freely with my life, / not avoiding injury to others, / not
avoiding injury to myself."

The link between self-injury and injury to others may
have been learnt from Lowell's parents, whose icy, genteel antagonism is
brilliantly presented in Life Studies
(1959), the book seen as instigating the "confessional verse"
movement, whose practitioners included Lowell's student, Sylvia Plath. In Life
Studies, Lowell presents his childhood, family history and his struggle with
marriage and mental illness as legitimate sources of highly artful poetry.

Not irrelevant to the power of this book was the fact
that Lowell was one of the Boston Lowells, a patrician New England family who
counted several worthies among its ancestry. Against such a background, Lowell's
career was self-consciously that of a "major" poet. Such self-consciousness is
seen in his poetry's scope and difficulty. His early work is dense, highly
allusive, and formal. The best of this, The Quaker Graveyard in
Nantucket, uses imagery from the Bible and Moby Dick
to present a vision of America as both sublimely
idealistic and violent.

But as this massive Collected Poems shows, Lowell was less a poet of vision than of revision. He
obsessively revised and reused his work. Most famously, Notebook 1967-68 (1969)
was revised and expanded first into Notebook (1970) and then into two separate
books, History and For Lizzie and Harriet
(both
1973).

Such a condition accounts for the decades it has taken
for Lowell's Collected Poems
to appear. The work is beautifully produced and the editors' contribution
(especially the extensive and useful notes) is superb. Their most radical
decision was to reject Notebook in favour of History. The former is immediate,
disordered and improvisatory. The latter is vast and organised, beginning with
poems about Adam and Eve and working through history to the present day. Each
poem is a blank verse "sonnet" (the form that also accounts for the entirety
of For Lizzie and Harriet and The Dolphin).

History (and his translations and imitations of other
poets) illustrates Lowell's ambition, as well as the extent of his revisionism.
For Lowell generally, all of literary history is available: the Bible,
the classics, Jonathan Edwards, the Symbolists, apothegms of Coleridge, Emerson,
Wittgenstein, a story by the poet Elizabeth Bishop, memorable things said by the
poet's young daughter, and the letters of Lowell's ex-wife (which appeared in
altered form in The Dolphin
). The list could go on and on.

He uses everybody, including himself. As well as allusions, misquotations,
parodies and imitations, Lowell's poems are crowded with historical figures:
classical heroes and European royalty; modern-day crooks and Lowell's
contemporaries. Despite his distaste for the Victorian poet Robert Browning,
there is something Browning-like in the sheer variety of Lowell's work. His
question about Browning could equally be asked of himself: "Who couldn't he
use, Napoleon III, St John, Cardinal Manning, Caliban?"

For all Lowell is remembered as a confessional poet, he was also a public
one, writing powerful public elegies (such as For the Union Dead) and poems on
current events: the Kennedy assassinations, the threat of nuclear war, the
Vietnam War. Lowell's political inspirations weren't wholly abstract. He was
imprisoned during World War II as a conscientious objector and was an early
opposer of the Vietnam War. Lowell's revisionism is also present in his
political poems. One of his most powerful, Women, Children, Babies, Cows, Cats,
responds to (and appropriates) a soldier's testimony regarding the massacre at
My Lai.

Reading Lowell's Collected Poems - at last - one is struck with the
seriousness with which Lowell took his vocation. There is something impressive
about his free translations, and about the difficult, hieratic diction of his
early work. There is something imposing about his vast cultural knowledge and
technical facility (especially with regard to rhyme). And there is something
moving about The Dolphin, even if we share Elizabeth Bishop's reservations about
its mixing of "fact and fiction". (In response to the work in manuscript,
Bishop famously wrote in a letter to Lowell that "Art just isn't worth that
much".)

Collected Poems also shows that Lowell is like a poetic historian. The shifts
in his life and career echo wider shifts in the times, from the serious '40s to
the morally experimental '70s. This is something Lowell himself seems aware of.
"These are the tranquillised Fifties, / and I am forty," he writes in Memories
of West Street and Lepke. In For John Berryman, partly a portrait of the
generation of poets to which Lowell and Berryman belonged, he writes of "our
fifties' fellowships / to Paris, Rome and Florence, / veterans of the Cold War
not the War - / all the best of life / then daydreaming to drink at six". This
was a generation that "asked to be obsessed with writing, / and we were".

There is also something historical about Lowell's ambition. Not for him the
cool or amusing postmodern pastiche of Frank O'Hara or John Ashbery. Lowell has
no doubt that the history to which he alludes is public, significant and shared.
For all he radically reprocesses the Western canon, it is never under question.
For all he opens the private realm to scrutiny, the role of the poet remains
essentially public.

Lowell was a great poet, but flawed. With this belated (and magnificent)
publication of his Collected Poems we can at last see how much those flaws were
integral to his greatness. Of the many lines that Lowell appropriated and
reworked, one from Emerson stands out as movingly apt for Lowell, a poet of such
turmoil, pain and ambition: "There is a crack in everything God has made."